The life of Ben McCulloch, a frontiersman, entrepreneur, and soldier mortally wounded at the battle of Pea Ridge in 1862, exemplifies the path of nineteenth-century American military cultture
With a closeness perhaps unique to siblings orphaned young, Orlando and Artimisia “Missie” Palmer exchanged intimate letters throughout their lives. These letters (interspersed with additional letters from Oliver Kennedy, the Palmers’ first cousin) offer a clear and entertaining window into the life and times of a junior Confederate officer serving in the Western Theater of the Civil War. Though he initially felt Americans would see “the folly and the madness” of going to war, Orlando enlisted as a private in what would become Company H of the First (later Fifteenth) Arkansas Infantry, informing his sister that he had volunteered “not for position, not for a name, but from patriotic motivation.” However, he was ambitious enough to secure an appointment as Maj. Gen. William Joseph Hardee’s personal secretary; he then rose to become his regiment’s sergeant major, his company’s first lieutenant, and later captain and brigade adjutant. Soldier letters typically report only what can be observed at the company level, but Palmer’s high-ranking position offers a unique view of strategic rather than tactical operations. Palmer’s letters are not all related to his military experience, though, and the narrative is enhanced by his nuanced reflections on courtship customs and personal relationships. For instance, Palmer frequently attempts to entertain Missie with witticisms and tales of his active romantic life: “We have so much to do,” he quips, “that we have no time to do anything save to visit the women. I am in love with several dozen of them and am having a huge time generally.” The Folly and the Madness adds depth to the genre of Civil War correspondence and provides a window into the lives of ordinary southerners at an extraordinary time.
Though its most famous battles were waged in the East at Antietam, Gettysburg, and throughout Virginia, the Civil War was clearly a conflict that raged across a continent. From cotton-rich Texas and the fields of Kansas through Indian Territory and into the high desert of New Mexico, the Trans-Mississippi Theater was site of major clashes from the war's earliest days through the surrenders of Confederate generals Edmund Kirby Smith and Stand Waite in June 1865. In this comprehensive military history of the war west of the Mississippi River, Thomas W. Cutrer shows that the theater's distance from events in the East does not diminish its importance to the unfolding of the larger struggle.
Though its most famous battles were waged in the East at Antietam, Gettysburg, and throughout Virginia, the Civil War was clearly a conflict that raged across a continent. From cotton-rich Texas and the fields of Kansas through Indian Territory and into the high desert of New Mexico, the Trans-Mississippi Theater was site of major clashes from the war's earliest days through the surrenders of Confederate generals Edmund Kirby Smith and Stand Waite in June 1865. In this comprehensive military history of the war west of the Mississippi River, Thomas W. Cutrer shows that the theater's distance from events in the East does not diminish its importance to the unfolding of the larger struggle.
Parnassus on the Mississippi is a history of the short-lived yet remarkable productive epoch when, in the words of C. Vann Woodward, “the center of the avant-garde of American literary criticism shifted temporarily to the banks of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge.” Beginning with the establishment of the Southern Review at Louisiana State University in 1935, Baton Rouge became the home not only to a brand of criticism that would reshape the teaching of literature in America but also to a community of scholars and artists that included Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Peter Taylor. Thomas Cutrer chronicles how the Southern Review, created in the midst of the Depression by the largess of Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, quickly rose to the position of the finest American literary journal of its day. Under the joint editorship of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, the journal published criticism, poetry, and short fiction by writers as eminent as R.P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, T.S. Elliot, and Wallace Stevens. The editors also encouraged and published works by such young talented, and at the time unknown writers as Nelson Algren, Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy, and Eudora Welty. During these same years, Brooks and Warren collaborated on three textbooks—An Approach to Literature, Understanding Poetry, and Understanding Fiction—which would revolutionize college English by emphasizing the study of a literary work itself, in concrete and precise terms, over the study of the biographical, historical, and moral issues surrounding it. Brooks also wrote his influential critical works Modern Poetry and Tradition and The Well Wrought Urn, while Warren wrote two novels and some of his finest poems and stories, and absorbed material from the political tumult around him for the work that would later become All the King’s Men. The stature of the Southern Review and the vitality of the literary community that it spawned were both, to a great extent, born of the dedication and creativity of Books and Warren, but in other very tangible ways, they were also by-products of the ambition of Huey Long; ironically, it was the actions of one of the assassinated governor’s loyalists that brought an end to Baton Rouge’s time as a Parnassus. After a financial scandal rocked the university, a reform administration was appointed which, in its zeal to curb a runaway budget, stopped the funding for the review. Soon after, Brooks and Warren both left the faculty. The Southern Review itself would lie dormant until its revival two decades later.
Though its most famous battles were waged in the East at Antietam, Gettysburg, and throughout Virginia, the Civil War was clearly a conflict that raged across a continent. From cotton-rich Texas and the fields of Kansas through Indian Territory and into the high desert of New Mexico, the Trans-Mississippi Theater was site of major clashes from the war's earliest days through the surrenders of Confederate generals Edmund Kirby Smith and Stand Waite in June 1865. In this comprehensive military history of the war west of the Mississippi River, Thomas W. Cutrer shows that the theater's distance from events in the East does not diminish its importance to the unfolding of the larger struggle.
Parnassus on the Mississippi is a history of the short-lived yet remarkable productive epoch when, in the words of C. Vann Woodward, “the center of the avant-garde of American literary criticism shifted temporarily to the banks of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge.” Beginning with the establishment of the Southern Review at Louisiana State University in 1935, Baton Rouge became the home not only to a brand of criticism that would reshape the teaching of literature in America but also to a community of scholars and artists that included Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Peter Taylor. Thomas Cutrer chronicles how the Southern Review, created in the midst of the Depression by the largess of Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, quickly rose to the position of the finest American literary journal of its day. Under the joint editorship of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, the journal published criticism, poetry, and short fiction by writers as eminent as R.P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, T.S. Elliot, and Wallace Stevens. The editors also encouraged and published works by such young talented, and at the time unknown writers as Nelson Algren, Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy, and Eudora Welty. During these same years, Brooks and Warren collaborated on three textbooks—An Approach to Literature, Understanding Poetry, and Understanding Fiction—which would revolutionize college English by emphasizing the study of a literary work itself, in concrete and precise terms, over the study of the biographical, historical, and moral issues surrounding it. Brooks also wrote his influential critical works Modern Poetry and Tradition and The Well Wrought Urn, while Warren wrote two novels and some of his finest poems and stories, and absorbed material from the political tumult around him for the work that would later become All the King’s Men. The stature of the Southern Review and the vitality of the literary community that it spawned were both, to a great extent, born of the dedication and creativity of Books and Warren, but in other very tangible ways, they were also by-products of the ambition of Huey Long; ironically, it was the actions of one of the assassinated governor’s loyalists that brought an end to Baton Rouge’s time as a Parnassus. After a financial scandal rocked the university, a reform administration was appointed which, in its zeal to curb a runaway budget, stopped the funding for the review. Soon after, Brooks and Warren both left the faculty. The Southern Review itself would lie dormant until its revival two decades later.
[A] well-written, comprehensively researched biography.--Publishers Weekly "Will both edify the scholar while captivating and entertaining the general reader. . . . Cutrer's research is impeccable, his prose vigorous, and his life of McCulloch likely to remain the standard for many years.--Civil War "A well-crafted work that makes an important contribution to understanding the frontier military tradition and the early stages of the Civil War in the West.--Civil War History "A penetrating study of a man who was one of the last citizen soldiers to wear a general's stars.--Blue and Gray "A brisk narrative filled with colorful quotations by and about the central figure. . . . Will become the standard biography of Ben McCulloch.--Journal of Southern History "A fast-paced, clearly written narrative that does full justice to its heroically oversized subject.--American Historical Review
In 1860, Orlando S. Palmer left his home in north Alabama to study law in Tennessee and the following year went into practice in Des Arc, Arkansas. With Arkansas's secession, Palmer joined what would become Company H of the First (later Fifteenth) Arkansas Infantry and soon became his company's captain and brigade's adjutant. As such, he was closely associated with William J. Hardee, Thomas C. Hindman, and Patrick R. Cleburne, the latter of whom he served from the day that the First Arkansas was organized until Palmer and Cleburne both sustained fatal wounds at the battle of Franklin, November 30, 1864. The letters, almost all of which are addressed to his sister, "Missie," are divided equally between military and social concerns. Cutrer argues these letters offer a clear and entertaining window into the life and times of a junior officer serving in the Army of Tennessee
On the morning of December 7, 1941, after serving breakfast and turning his attention to laundry services aboard the USS West Virginia, Ship’s Cook Third Class Doris “Dorie” Miller heard the alarm calling sailors to battle stations. The first of several torpedoes dropped from Japanese aircraft had struck the American battleship. Miller hastily made his way to a central point and was soon called to the bridge by Lt. Com. Doir C. Johnson to assist the mortally wounded ship’s captain, Mervyn Bennion. Miller then joined two others in loading and firing an unmanned anti-aircraft machine gun—a weapon that, as an African American in a segregated military, Miller had not been trained to operate. But he did, firing the weapon on attacking Japanese aircraft until the .50-caliber gun ran out of ammunition. For these actions, Miller was later awarded the Navy Cross, the third-highest naval award for combat gallantry. Historians Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish have not only painstakingly reconstructed Miller’s inspiring actions on December 7. They also offer for the first time a full biography of Miller placed in the larger context of African American service in the United States military and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. Like so many sailors and soldiers in World War II, Doris Miller’s life was cut short. Just two years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Miller was aboard the USS Liscome Bay when it was sunk by a Japanese submarine. But the name—and symbolic image—of Dorie Miller lived on. As Cutrer and Parrish conclude, “Dorie Miller’s actions at Pearl Harbor, and the legend that they engendered, were directly responsible for helping to roll back the navy’s then-to-fore unrelenting policy of racial segregation and prejudice, and, in the chain of events, helped to launch the civil rights movement of the 1960s that brought an end to the worst of America’s racial intolerance.”
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On the morning of December 7, 1941, after serving breakfast and turning his attention to laundry services aboard the USS West Virginia, Ship’s Cook Third Class Doris “Dorie” Miller heard the alarm calling sailors to battle stations. The first of several torpedoes dropped from Japanese aircraft had struck the American battleship. Miller hastily made his way to a central point and was soon called to the bridge by Lt. Com. Doir C. Johnson to assist the mortally wounded ship’s captain, Mervyn Bennion. Miller then joined two others in loading and firing an unmanned anti-aircraft machine gun—a weapon that, as an African American in a segregated military, Miller had not been trained to operate. But he did, firing the weapon on attacking Japanese aircraft until the .50-caliber gun ran out of ammunition. For these actions, Miller was later awarded the Navy Cross, the third-highest naval award for combat gallantry. Historians Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish have not only painstakingly reconstructed Miller’s inspiring actions on December 7. They also offer for the first time a full biography of Miller placed in the larger context of African American service in the United States military and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. Like so many sailors and soldiers in World War II, Doris Miller’s life was cut short. Just two years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Miller was aboard the USS Liscome Bay when it was sunk by a Japanese submarine. But the name—and symbolic image—of Dorie Miller lived on. As Cutrer and Parrish conclude, “Dorie Miller’s actions at Pearl Harbor, and the legend that they engendered, were directly responsible for helping to roll back the navy’s then-to-fore unrelenting policy of racial segregation and prejudice, and, in the chain of events, helped to launch the civil rights movement of the 1960s that brought an end to the worst of America’s racial intolerance.”
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